This riveting film documents the grim realities of the American food industry, which has been so infected by capitalism that it encourages illness, injustice and bullying on a massive scale. But will this movie make a difference?

There's a remarkable amount of information here, and filmmaker Kenner assembles with clarity, building our outrage as he goes. We see how the way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than in all of human history before that, and yet we delude ourselves with the "pastoral fantasy" that what we consume still comes from farms. The reality is that food is a mega-industry: they're factories, not farms, and it's a product, not a living chicken.

Though not all that remarkable nor exceptional as far as documentary filmmaking goes, Food, Inc., the new work by Two Days in October helmer Robert Kenner, is nonetheless something I feel would benefit any viewer who hasn't been introduced to the concepts of how agrarian business has mutated over the years. However, it will no doubt find a better home in lecture halls and classrooms than it will in the bustling landscape of arthouse theatergoing.

Navigated by Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan -- the authors of Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore's Dilemma, respectively -- Kenner begins where any concern for the national health does: McDonald's. Briskly showing the rise of the company founders from humble drive-in owners to business-minded economic gladiators, the director offers a quick and easy allegory for the entire food-making and harvesting industry.

Ambitious as hell but irreparably flawed, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood enthralls for half its run but balances precariously atop an epilogue that can't sustain the picture's dramatic weight. Picture a circus elephant perched on a beach ball at the center of the big top. Teeter, teeter, topple.

Opening with its protagonist buried deep in a hole from which he never really emerges, Blood tracks the turn-of-the-century dealings of miner Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis, magnetic) who transitions from silver to oil when he taps vast, black resources beneath California's undeveloped frontier. A decade after stumbling across their first reserve, Daniel and his adoptive son, H.W. Plainview (saucer-eyed Dillon Freasier), are snapping up as much land as possible to increase the family's corporate empire.

A few weeks ago, it was announced by McDonald's that it would be making an unprecedented push towards "class." Amongst other things, it will be installing wireless internet in a large amount of its restaurants and changing décor into a mellow, art-friendly utopia for college students. Basically, it's tired of Starbucks being the only double-edged sword in the drawer. Sounds nice, but these aesthetic changes won't matter much in the face of the horrors depicted in Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation.

Adapted from the inadaptable investigative best-seller by Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation sets a whirlwind of brouhaha in a small Colorado town. The town in question, Cody, doesn't really exist but neither does the fast food chain that started there, Mickey's (God that sounds familiar). Mickey's flagship meal is The Big One, an extra-large patty processed and shipped at a local meatpacking plant that employs illegal aliens like young couple Sylvia (the excellent Catalina Sandino Moreno) and Raul (a shockingly restrained Wilmer Valderrama). The Big One was thought up by Mickey's marketing whiz-kid Don Henderson (Greg Kinnear), who has been sent to Cody to investigate a high amount of fecal matter being found in the product that made him a success.

A few weeks ago, it was announced by McDonald's that it would be making an unprecedented push towards "class." Amongst other things, it will be installing wireless internet in a large amount of its restaurants and changing décor into a mellow, art-friendly utopia for college students. Basically, it's tired of Starbucks being the only double-edged sword in the drawer. Sounds nice, but these aesthetic changes won't matter much in the face of the horrors depicted in Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation.

Adapted from the inadaptable investigative best-seller by Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation sets a whirlwind of brouhaha in a small Colorado town. The town in question, Cody, doesn't really exist but neither does the fast food chain that started there, Mickey's (God that sounds familiar). Mickey's flagship meal is The Big One, an extra-large patty processed and shipped at a local meatpacking plant that employs illegal aliens like young couple Sylvia (the excellent Catalina Sandino Moreno) and Raul (a shockingly restrained Wilmer Valderrama). The Big One was thought up by Mickey's marketing whiz-kid Don Henderson (Greg Kinnear), who has been sent to Cody to investigate a high amount of fecal matter being found in the product that made him a success.